The truth is, it’s a bit silly

I’M beginning to think LIAR (ITV, 9pm) may be a tiny bit more ridiculous than I’ve been giving it credit for. But you know what it’s like with these things. It’s a bit like getting to a certain point in a novel that you’ve realised is rather silly.

You still want to know how it ends. You can’t help yourself.

So, yes, here we are at Liar’s fourth episode, just two more to go after this, probably just as well, and it’s at this point that its flashback element intensifies.

Up until now, most of the rewinding has been taking us back a mere three weeks, to focus on events leading up to the murder of surgeon Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd).

This time we turn the clock back eight whole years, to reveal a pivotal moment in the life of the show’s key character, teacher Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt), the woman Earlham raped in series one and who’s now the red-hot favourite to have bumped him off, at least in the view of the ludicrous DI Karen Renton (Katherine Kelly).

But then the whole thing fast-forwards again, or rather it flashes back just the standard three weeks (I do hope you’re keeping up with all this, it’s making me feel slightly seasick), to show us a key moment in Earlham’s transition from run-of-the-mill creep to out-and-out embodiment of evil.

Let’s just say you’ll find it quite surprising.You won’t, but let’s just say it.

From terrible cops to very good ones – not least because they’re real – and the start of a new Channel 5 series called INSIDE THE FORCE (9pm).

It’s another of those fly-on-thewall documentaries, although I don’t think that’s what they call them any more, and follows everyday goings-on at a police station in Lincoln.

I appreciate we’ve had rather a lot of these shows (is there a police force in Britain that hasn’t yet featured on a TV documentary…?) but I’d be lying if I said they weren’t mildly addictive.

The force in Lincoln, this one tells us, has less money than any other.This must make their job really tough, although it’s made a little easier, I’m sure, by the fact that most of the criminals stand out a mile, thanks to their funny fuzzed-out faces.

The characters these officers have to deal with in episode one – and when I say “characters”, I’m being disproportionately polite – include one chap who seems quite familiar to them, an environmentalist who’s been brought in for allegedly threatening a farmer.

“I didn’t threaten to kill him,” he insists. “I just said it would be better if he were dead.”

And then he takes all his clothes off.